‘There’s a reason behind The CLUTTER’
SortYour Life Out host Stacey Solomon on helping people clear their house and what motivates her to be organised
When 19-year-old Stacey Solomon first appeared on The X Factor singing her spine-tingling version of What A Wonderful World, viewers fell in love with her. Fifteen years later, Stacey has gone from being a struggling single mum to one of TV’s biggest stars. Her career has seen her win I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, carve out a successful presenting career and amass six million Instagram fans. All the while, she’s raising her five kids, Zachary, 15, Leighton, 11, Rex, four, Rose, two, and Belle, 12 months, with husband, Joe Swash, who is the father of her three youngest and is also dad to 16-year-old Harry from a previous relationship.
“I’m waiting for someone to be like,‘Oh, it’s all over now. It was just a big joke,’” she admits. “I laugh with my mum all the time. I’ve been in scenarios that neither of us could ever imagine.
I got to interview Boris Johnson once and my mum just rang me up laughing, going, ‘What are you doing with Boris Johnson?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know, Mum!’ Every opportunity I get, we can’t believe it.”
Stacey has excelled at every role she’s taken but the 34-year-old knows that grafting isn’t always enough.
“People will say, ‘Oh, you work hard,’” says Stacey. “But the reality is I got so lucky. I worked really hard and gave it my absolute best, but I still have been lucky to have fallen into those situations where somebody gave me an opportunity. I’ll keep going until it finishes.”
Stacey must be doing something right because she’s back with a fourth series of Sort Your Life Out. Stacey and her team go into people’s houses, recycle or upcycle their clutter and leave them with a reorganised home. But for Stacey, the show is as much about helping people say goodbye to past trauma as it is about parting with old belongings.
“It’s the psychological side of it that helps more than anything,” she says.“There’s always a reason behind the clutter. Whether that be emotional attachment or a trauma in their life that has meant they haven’t been able to move forward. There’s so much psychological behaviour behind why we hold on to stuff. Most of my day is figuring out why and we can have a conversation and work out how best to support them to let go of as much as possible.”
Stacey often keeps in touch with people who appear on the show and has found that, mostly, they don’t go back to their old ways. “When they get home they see how they could live in their home and no one ever wants to go back there,” she says.
In fact, some participants use the changes to kick-start a new phase in their life. “There are people who’ve then ended up losing loads of weight and getting healthy and there was a single mum who got her home together and ended up meeting somebody because she finally felt comfortable taking them back to her home,” she says. “There are so many success stories and it’s not necessarily how clean they have kept their house, it’s how their lifestyle changes and everything around it.”
Stacey says she learned to be organised when she had her first baby aged 18.“When I had Zachary, I went from a carefree, I’m-never-gonna-die-life-is-fantastic teenager to, ‘I’ve got a child who depends on me.’”
Stacey returned to college after Zachary was born but had to organise her life to fit everything in. “I had a baby who was in the nursery at college and then I had to get a job afterwards to pay for college,” she says.
“I tried to hang on to my social life and I couldn’t do it. I realised if I wasn’t meticulously organised, I couldn’t get my milk vouchers. I had to pick up my giro at a certain time every week, I had to get the baby into nursery and out of nursery at a certain time – there was so much for me to think about. If I didn’t get my a**e in gear, I wouldn’t have survived. I wouldn’t have passed my A levels and I wouldn’t have kept my baby alive. It shocked me into it. Every time I slipped back from that organised self, I’d just feel I couldn’t cope with life.